Tribeca 2019 Preview: Raising the Curtain on the Rest of the Program
Yesterday we took a look at the competitions at this year's Tribeca Film Fest. Ahead of the festival's kick off tonight -- with the world premiere of Harlem theater docu The Apollo -- we are touring the rest of the...
Tribeca 2019 Preview: Across the Competitions
NYC's big indie festival the Tribeca Film Fest kicks off tomorrow. It's another solid lineup of features (plus TV, plus VR, plus talks) and we've been poring over the catalog looking for the special gems. The festival runs three competitions:...
Review: SHARP OBJECTS Begins Its Incision
With a series that practically bills itself as being chock full of surprises, probably the least surprising thing one can say is that Amy Adams, who is pretty much great in everything, is also great in Sharp Objects. In fact,...
New York Asian 2018 Dispatch: Asian Noir in New York
Don’t tell the U.S. President, but if this edition of the NYAFF is any indication, his nation is probably running a massive trade deficit with Asia when it comes to film noir, China in particular. Here’s a quick look at...
New York Asian Film Festival 2018 Sneak Peek: Weird, Wild Summertime Cinema
With the summer heat on full blast this coming weekend in New York, patrons of the five burroughs may want to consider the cool and also very hip insides of a movie theater for proper retreat and enjoyment. And what...
Exclusive Trailer: BAD PETER, Chilling Sci-Fi Short
Impressive at Tribeca a couple of months ago, Zach Strauss’s near-future short Bad Peter now gets a trailer. We’re excited to debut it here, ahead of Thursday’s bow of the film itself. The film "follows an expecting mother forced into...
Blu-ray Review: KING OF HEARTS, Still a Compelling Portrait of Madness
If you view them as mentally ill, you won’t enjoy yourself too much. Not in this day and age. And rightfully so. I’m referring to the residents, central to Phlippe De Broca’s antiwar farce King of Hearts, of the French...
Review: EVIL GENIUS Shines Darkly on Netflix
It’s a toss-up as to whether one identifies more with the murder suspects or the murder victims, and that’s part of what makes Netflix's Evil Genius such irresistible viewing in its first two episodes. Part of me wants to say: “That’s...
Tribeca 2018 Dispatch: Showbiz Documentaries
The typical showbiz documentary, like the true-crime doc, the unexplored-niche doc and so many other related subgenres, has its hooks, its patterns, its agendas. What’s neat about some of the showbiz docs at the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) this year...
Tribeca 2018 Dispatch: Recommended Genre Shorts
In 2018 Tribeca’s overall shorts program, as in past years, has been both vast and satisfying. Perhaps more impressively, the genre shorts are particularly strong, not just token entries included to appease certain audience segments. These, then, are some of...
Tribeca 2018 Dispatch: The Many Pleasures of Horror
Perhaps not every horror fan will confess this, but we’re not always looking for masterpieces, or even movies that we’d recommend wholeheartedly. Instead, it’s all about moments and ideas, preferably ones that reflect the whole of the filmmaker’s heart and...
Exclusive: Sono! Sabu! Uchida! Animerama! Third Window Films 2018 Slate Looks Amazing!
Third Window Films, the English-speaking world's most well-respected distributors of comtemporary and modern Asian films on home video, has had a rough year, but they are revved-up and ready to go with a 2018 slate of releases that looks out...
Gamera Obscura: GREEN ROOM, the Definitive Film on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Let me start by being perfectly clear about something: Green Room is wonderful and powerful in so many ways and on so many levels, that it hardly requires the following topical tie-in to provide a reason to appreciate it. But if you’re...
Gamera Obscura: We're the Ones Who Need an Exorcist
If you’re as big a fan of Friedkin’s The Exorcist as I am, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s been touch and go out there in TV land. For every moment of the new Fox series that...
NYC Happenings: Far-Ranging Lucio Fulci Retro at Anthology
It’s not an entirely rhetorical question: if you showed a bunch of Lucio Fulci movies to audiences that had never seen anything by him, could they detect that they were all directed by the same person? I’m guessing they would,...
Gamera Obscura: I Miss Guillermo del Toro
I suppose the tenth anniversary of the release of Pan’s Labyrinth would have done the trick all by itself. As with any such anniversary, you wonder where all the time went. And sometimes you wonder what exactly all those intervening...
Brooklyn Horror 2016 Review: WITHOUT NAME, Visionary Horror That Transports
Easily the most transporting film, horror or otherwise, I’ve seen in a long time, Without Name is one of those works of art I’ll now carry around inside me. Like certain pieces of music. Like certain poems. To be more...
Brooklyn Horror 2016 Review: THE MASTER CLEANSE, Refreshingly Disgusting
The sign of a really successful movie is, sometimes, that it’s unclear just how to review it. There’s simply too much to process, to continue mulling over, even days after seeing it. In my case this certainly applies to The...
Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: ScreenAnarchy's Top Picks
The sign of a great horror film fest is not how many of the best, or soon-to-be best-known, horror flicks it screens, but how it encompasses the wide, wild world of horror—so few venues of any sort attempt that, let...
Gamera Obscura: How THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN Improves on SEVEN SAMURAI
Neither the first nor, surely, the last person to argue how Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven remake changes everything by changing the core story to one of revenge, I’ll strive to be original by contending that “everything,” in this case,...
